A survey by professional staffing firm Addison Group,
cited on Bloomberg, found that just one-third of American
workers believe that becoming a manager can advance their
careers.

Moreover, of the nearly 1,500 working Americans born between 1946
and 1995 who were surveyed, only one-quarter were interested in
becoming more effective managers. Seventeen percent said they
don't enjoy managing others at all.

This research isn't the first to find that being a manager is
not a universal goal. A 2014
CareerBuilder survey found that just over a third of workers
said they aspire to leadership positions, while a mere 7% hope to
get promoted into senior or C-level management.

In both surveys, young workers were more likely than older
workers to be aiming for promotions, which makes sense given
that they are early in their careers and see more
opportunity for advancement.

Yet according to Bloomberg, millennials are less interested in
being promoted to management roles than past generations of young
people were.

So are these findings cause for alarm? A sign of laziness or
apathy among the newest generation of workers?

Not exactly.

Google provides
opportunities for employees to grow without becoming
people-managers.Google

Bloomberg spoke to Steve Wolfe, executive vice president of
operations at Addison Group, who said that while millennials seem
generally uninterested in people management, they do
want more personal responsibility.

"We're seeing more millennials who want to be
knowledge experts today, rather than in charge of other people,"
Wolfe told Bloomberg.

Meanwhile, more than half of respondents in the CareerBuilder
survey said they don't want to be a manager because they're
content with the role they have. (Respondents could choose more
than one reason.)

It may be that millennials are more aware of their strengths
and more likely to seek personal fulfillment
from their careers than generations past. After
all, some people are better suited to management roles than
others, and just because you're a high-performer doesn't mean
you'll be effective at or enjoy managing others.

To retain employees who don't aspire
to management because they like the work they're
currently doing, organizations would be wise to expand their
opportunities for advancement as individual contributors. Instead
of placing employees in the position where they have to choose
between managing a team and staying put, there should be an
option to move into a knowledge expert role, without being
responsible for other people.

It's unlikely that companies would wind up in the situation where
no one wants to be in charge — there will always be employees who
love the idea of being people-managers and are genuinely good at
it. Instead, it's likely that companies would run more
efficiently if everyone took on roles that played to their
individual strengths.

Of course, the CareerBuilder survey also found
that more than one-third of workers shy away from management
positions because they don't want to sacrifice work-life
balance, which suggests that organizations may need
to address problems with their cultures.

Some companies recognize this idea and have restructured their
paths for development accordingly. Scott DeRue, an associate dean
at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business, told
Bloomberg that Google and Oracle offer opportunities to grow
without becoming a people-manager.

Yet many companies don't allow employees to develop this
way. In April, for example, someone wrote in to
the career advice site Ask A
Manager about how to decline a promotion into
leadership. The post sparked nearly 100 comments,
mostly from readers who sympathized with the person's
dilemma.

The conversation on AAM highlights a key problem
with the structure of many modern businesses. Too often,
companies encourage high-performers who aren't fit to be managers
(or don't want to be managers) to seek out those opportunities.
In doing so, they may end up undermining their organization's
progress by not allowing people to do what they do
best.

Moreover, pushing high-performers into people-management
effectively ignores the fact that there are many different forms
of "leadership."

Plenty of business experts have pointed out that people can lead and
inspire at all levels of an organization. When you think about
how you can be more effective and creative in your job, you are
being a leader; when you present new ideas to the people you
report to, you are also being a leader.

Unfortunately, we haven't yet reached the point
where people who can lead in those ways are praised and
financially rewarded in the same way that high-level managers
are.